György Paál

In the late 1950s Paál studied the quasar and galaxy cluster distributions. In 1970 from redshift quantization he came up with the idea that the Universe might have nontrivial topological structure.[2] [3] These are the oldest papers that associate real observations with the possibility that our universe could have nontrivial topology[4].

In 1992, G. Paal, et al. [5] and A. Holba, et al. [6] reanalyzed the redshift data from a fairly large sample of galaxies and concluded that there was an unexplained periodicity of redshifts.

From the observed galaxy distribution in 1992 Paal et al.[5] suggested non-zero cosmological constant. Two years later in another paper[7] they suggested ${\displaystyle \Omega _{\Lambda }\simeq 2/3}$.[8] Though later observations confirmed this value[9], the redshift quantization of quasars, which Paál et al. (1992)'s arguments were based on, is generally considered to be a false-positive caused by selection effect[10].

Cosmological Committee of IAU[1]

László Detre award.

• Accelerating universe
• Cosmological constant
• Dark energy
• Redshift quantization
• Universe
• Shape of the universe